Shares of chip equipment vendor Lam Research (LRCX) are higher by $1.74, or 2%, at $79.41, in late trading, after the company this afternoon reported fiscal Q4 results that beat analysts’ expectations, and forecast this quarter’s revenue and profit much higher than consensus.

Revenue in the three months ended in June rose 6%, year over year, to $1.48 billion, yielding EPS of $1.50.

Analysts had been modeling $1.46 billion and $1.47 per share.

The company’s gross profit margin, on a non-GAAP basis, rose to 45.5% from 44.7% in the prior quarter, it said.

CEO Martin Anstice said the company had “concluded the strongest fiscal year in our history.”

Added Anstice, “The inflection driven expansion in our served available market over the next several years combined with our enduring focus on supporting our customers’ long term success, creates exciting opportunity.”

The company ended the quarter with cash and equivalents and investments of $4.2 billion, up from $4.1 billion in March, after bringing in $292 million in cash from operations, and $74 million in stock buybacks, among other things.

The company said its deferred revenue rose to $518.1 million from $485.2 million. A separate item, anticipated future revenue from shipments to Japan, was “approximately $164.4 million,” said Lam.

For the current quarter, the company sees revenue of $1.53 billion to $1.68 billion and EPS of $1.60 to $1.80, which is above consensus for $1.42 billion and $1.39.

Facebook (FB) this afternoon reported revenue and earnings that topped analysts’ expectations, and also beat on user growth, but still saw its shares sell off in late trading.

Revenue in the three months ended in June rose to $4.04 billion, yielding EPS of 50 cents.

Analysts are modeling Facebook to report $3.99 billion and 47 cents a share.

The company said its “monthly active users,” or MAUs, the main indication of its user base, rose 13%, year over year, to 1.49 billion. The average estimate going into the report was for 1.476 billion, up from 1.44 billion last quarter, per Factset.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it “another strong quarter,” remarking that “engagement across our family of apps keeps growing, and we remain focused on improving the quality of our services.”

Shares of enterprise software vendor Citrix Systems (CTXS) are up $5.42, or almost 8%, at $75.05, after the company yesterday beat Q2 expectations, and forecast year revenue in line with consensus, and said it would undertake a broad review of its business, including naming activist shop Elliott Management to its board of directors and considering selling off a software unit.

It also said CEO Mark Templeton will retire, and that a search is underway for his replacement.

The response on the Street is quite positive to moves that analysts hope will bring “shareholder value.”

The stock got at least one upgrade, from Steven Ashley of R.W. Baird, who raised his rating on the stock to Outperform from Neutral, and raises his price target to $80 from $75, arguing that earnings can recover in 2018, perhaps hitting $5.85 per share from an expected $3.66 this year.

Writing with evident sarcasm that it was “just your run of the mill ho-hum quarter,” in which everything changed, he declares, “The fox is in the hen house,” he writes, and he likes the prospect for change:

Our upgrade reflects our belief that new board leadership will aggressively drive shareholder value in the years immediately ahead. If valuation lags, we are assuming additional measures will be taken. We recognize the flip side of Elliot taking a board seat in return for a one-year standstill agreement means a big-bang break-up/sale of the company in the near term is less likely.

The sale of Citrix’s “GoTo” business could bring in over $3 billion, he wagers:

With mid-70s gross margins and 10% CAGR we believe the business could be worth 4.5x revenue, or $3.2B, which net of tax might generate net proceeds of $2.2B. While BoD has not yet decided what to do with those proceeds, “if” the decision was made to buy back stock, that could reduce outstanding shares by 30-34M shares, or 18%-21% of outstanding, which would be nicely accretive to EPS.

Elsewhere, there’s some eager anticipation of earnings going higher on cost cuts, but also some caution from the bears about deterioration in the company’s mainstay virtualization products, where it competes with VMware (VMW).

Ed Maguire, CLSA: Reiterates an Outperform rating, and an $81 price target. Citrix’s 2Q results demonstrated progress in execution and operational leverage, as the company announced a strategic review of the SaaS business, and CEO transition plan as Elliot Management joined the board. EPS upside should boost sentiment that changes are afoot. Despite mixed fundamentals across different moving parts, focus is trained on shareholder return. Whether the SaaS business is sold or not, operational improvements are trending to deliver EPS leverage.”

Scott Zeller, Needham & Co.: Reiterates a Buy rating, and an $82 price target. “The SaaS business has officially been tapped for “strategic alternatives” in a not-surprising move by CTXS. With CEO Templeton announcing his retirement (search has begun), and Elliott getting 2 seats on the Board, we believe the march toward shedding products and cost control continues toward the 30% operating margin range targeted by Elliott. Our “cost savings scenario” is updated in our note, and suggests a CY17 EPS of $5.03. Our CY15 and CY16 revenue eases, and EPS is raised on cost controls [...] Although CEO Mark Templeton’s announced retirement is not a surprise, it comes sooner than we expected. Activist Elliott has reached a standstill for 1-yr with CTXS; Elliott has one board seat outright, and will have influence over a 2nd seat soon. We continue to believe Elliott’s targets of approximately 30% operating margins are achievable for CTXS.”

Michael Turits, Raymond James: Reiterates a Market Perform rating. ” We feel the cooperation agreement, operating committee, and GoTo review are positives as they could drive additional value s. Citrix also made multiple governance announcements that we feel could be a positive long-term for rationalizing the product portfolio and improving financial performance and shareholder value. While 2Q was a solid pickup from 1Q, long term we remain concerned about Citrix’s core desktop growth, EUC/mobile competition against VMware, and NetScaler slowing.”

Bracelin raises his estimates for this year to $800 million in revenue and $2.03 per share in EPS from a prior $795 million and $2, and he raises his 2016 estimates to $1.014 billion and $2.41 from a prior $1 billion and $2.35 per share.

Both Microsoft, Arista’s largest customer, and Amazon, have shown strong growth in their latest reports, he writes:

Microsoft last week reported 88% growth in its “commercial cloud” revenue in the June quarter, even with the hit from the rising U.S. dollar; while Amazon the same week reported an 81% rise in AWS revenue.

Today’s piece is the latest in a string of target increases and positive initiations, following an upgrade in price target to $105 from Needham & Co. on Friday; an upgrade by Wedbush to $90 back in June; and a bullish initiation by Sterne Agee CRT in mid-June as well, with a $98 price target.

Arista is due to report Q2 results on Thursday, August 6th, after market close.

Shares of local listings and reviews purveyor Yelp (YELP) are down $9.27, or almost 28%, at $24.24, adding to last night’s after-hours losses, after the company missed Q2 profit expectations by a penny per share, and forecast this quarter’s results, and the full year, below consensus.

Shares of another local listings outfit, ReachLocal (RLOC) are actually up 7 cents, or 2.6%, at $2.82.

The company told analysts the two proximate causes of its weak outlook were the phasing out of its display ad business, and also lower-than-expected hiring in its sales team.

There have been at least seven downgrades of the stock today, from Northland Capital, Oppenheimer, Topeka Capital, Morgan Stanley, Cowen & Co., Raymond James, and Merrill Lynch, and multiple reductions of price target.

For these folks, all that matters is that Yelp is showing itself unable to retain qualified sales personnel.

Cowen’s Kevin Kopelman, cutting his rating to Market Perform from Outperform, and cutting his price target to $25 from $55, writes that company troubles are the result of “inability to retain veteran salespeople,” who, he believes, “are leaving for more lucrative positions at other tech companies.” That, and “continued lack of convincing ROI for a high-churn advertiser base.”

But the bigger problem is high advertiser churn, writes Kopelman:

The sales retention issue points to a deeper problem, the extremely high churn in Yelp’s SMB ad model. We believe Yelp’s advertiser churn averages at least 6% per month, despite locking many new customers into 1-year deals. The company has never convincingly responded to questions about churn, which is likely driven at least in part by poor ROI and/or lack of demonstrable ROI for a meaningful segment of new advertisers. While we do not believe churn has worsened, neither has it improved, despite the increase in Yelp’s consumer usage, brand name, and influence. Static high churn rates have limited Yelp’s leverage on sales and marketing employees, while simultaneously making it difficult to compensate them effectively.

Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowak, cutting his rating to Equal Weight from Overweight, writes that the “bear case is playing out,” with lower productivity from the sales team because people are being poached away:

We were previously modeling 35% sales force growth in 2015 and are lowering our estimate to 30%.This lower 2H hiring combined with YELP’s new lower full-year ’15 rev guidance implies local ad dollars per rep growth will slow to ~6% growth in 2H, from ~13% in 1H. We attribute this to increased churn from Yelp’s higher quality sales people driven by increased competitive bidding for talent in Silicon Valley as well as the lingering effects of Yelp’s unsuccessful 1Q:15 sales re-org…and the filling of the vacant sales positions with new, less experienced sales people. This, in our view,creates a structural challenge to Yelp’s long-term sales force productivity.

But there are a few bulls out there still…

Stephen Ju of Credit Suisse, maintaining his Outperform rating, but cuts his target to $44 from $70, writing that this is “the painful reset we were fearing,” and that cutting out display is an unexpected negative given it means the “loss of free cash flow dollars from ultimately a non-core but nevertheless high-margin revenue stream.”

But Ju thinks the property is still promising, just not “monetized” sufficiently:

Despite our suspicion that the Adj. EBITDA flow-through implied in the updated guidance is overly conservative, it may take some time for Yelp to regain investor confidence. And as we step back and look at the bigger picture, we believe that Yelp continues to present a unique consumer value proposition and as a property remains undermonetized. As such, our long-term positive bias (as user engagement remains healthy) remains unchanged, and we maintain our Outperform rating. We would use this pullback to either initiate or add to existing positions.

Brian Blair with Rosenblatt Securities, reiterating a Buy rating, writes that the stock is cheap enough, and the metrics are still good enough, even if a recovery in the financials has to wait until next year:

This is the third quarter in a row that Yelp has fallen short of investor expectations in its results and we believe that any turnaround that may have seemed possible earlier in the year will not happen this calendar year. Instead, we expect the balance of the year will mark a lengthy shift in focus for the company. The shift includes Yelp phasing out brand (display) advertising by the end of the year, running its first TV advertising campaign in an effort to raise consumer awareness domestically/locally and slowing its headcount growth. The impact is both a lowering of 3Q15 revenues as well as a lower full year revenue outlook (from $574M – $579M to $544M – $550M). On the positive side, Yelp continues to see growth in a number of its key metrics, including cumulative reviews, mobile uniques, and 3x sequential growth in clicks for directions within the app, which speaks to meaningful user engagement within the app. At current levels, the growth in the company’s core U.S. business as well as its ancillary businesses (like food ordering/delivery) allows us to remain long term positive, though we don’t expect meaningful improvement in the company’s bottom line until 2016.

Analysts are modeling Facebook to report $3.99 billion and 47 cents a share.

The average estimate for “monthly active users,” or MAUs, moreover, is for 1.476 billion, up from 1.44 billion last quarter, per Factset.

Among things to watch for, Axiom Capital‘s Victor Anthony yesterday noted several items, including comments from the company about progress with “auto-play video ads,” as part of the increasing focus on video in general; and any comments on the many properties now under the Facebook umbrella, including the standalone “Messenger” application; WhatsApp; Instagram; and Occulus Rift, the virtual reality headset product line that is supposed to come to market next year.

One interesting forecasting item on the conference call is expected to be expenses. Anthony thinks the company will re-iterate its expectation for 50% to 60% expense growth, on a non-GAAP basis, this year.

Anthony’s own estimates are in line with consensus, and he offers this breakdown of what he expects to see in the report:

Merkle/RKG have reported that spend increased 69% YoY on FB in 2Q15, up from 63% in 1Q15, and Nanigans saw higher CTRs and higher CPMs in 2Q relative to 1Q. Ad agencies are seeing increasing demand for spend on Facebook and increasing demand for video. We estimate Non-GAAP expense growth of 75% YoY (FY guidance of 50-60% YoY). We model advertising revenue growth of 43% (down from 46.4% in 1Q15) but facing a 15pt easier comp, and payments revenue growth of -8% YoY. We assume a 57% decline in the number of ads sold (vs. -62% in 1Q15) and a 235% YoY growth in pricing (vs. 285% in 1Q), with the right-hand rail redesign, video, and shift to mobile, where we believe pricing is higher, aided by mobile app installs, driving the pricing lift. Mobile ad revenues should constitute 76% of revenues (vs. 73% in 1Q15), and grow 75% YoY (vs. 81% YoY in 1Q15). We estimate MAUs of 1.465B (24M net adds), mobile MAUs of 1.276B, DAUs of 983M (47M net adds) and a DAU/MAU ratio of 67%. We project capex of $685M, 17% of revenues, higher than 1Q15’s 14% of revenue.

Shares of Intel (INTC) and Micron Technology (MU) continue to trade higher today after yesterday announcing a new form of memory chip that does not reply upon the classic semiconductor building block, the transistor, and that may displace some functions of both NAND flash memory chips and DRAM chips.

It’s safe to say the bulls, at least, are ecstatic: Some are calling it revolutionary, and wondering whether it breaks the limits imposed by transistor “scaling,” known in the business as Moore’s Law.

Credit Suisse‘s John Pitzer, who has an Outperform rating on Micron, puns off of the name of the product, “3D XPoint,” writing “X marks the spot.” He thinks “XPoint is a tangible example of the IP portfolio of both MU and INTC and should help quell concerns that MU technology pipeline is inferior to its Korean counterparts.”

Pitzer takes a stab at sizing the market:

Our initial take on the market opportunity over the next 3-5 years is $9-12bn/year, with the potential for MU/INTC to have 50% marketshare – we arrive at this estimate by looking at 30% cannibalization value of a server DRAM market of $13-17bn ($8bn today) and displacement of 30% enterprise/Datacenter NAND market of $9-$10bn ( $6bn today) – XPoint would take the former to $9-12bn and the latter to $15-17bn. Even assuming no incremental growth from new applications – our analysis suggests ~$2bn growth in overall market with potential for MU/Intel share to increase on the XPoint bits to 50% versus 15-20% currently. While this analysis is inherently flawed as it fails to account growth opportunities from new applications enabled by XpPoint – it serves as a reference for potentially base case scenario for sizing the opportunity for MU. Note MU current share in Server DRAM/Enterprise NAND is only 25%/10% today [...] Our checks would indicate that INTC/MU has been working with the ecosystem for some time implying time to market around software optimization is well underway, [...] We are still looking forward to more clarification from the company on the manufacturing agreement and/or potential CapEx sharing relative to 3D NAND in general and Xpoint specifically.

MKM Partners‘s Ian Ing, who has a Buy on Intel, and a Neutral rating on Micron, writes that the invention may “reset the constraints found in 50+ years of transistor-based memory design”:

While the applications and goals in launching this new memory design are initially modest, we see significant long-term potential in 3D cross-point applications to the benefit of Micron and Intel. Cost/performance/data retention tradeoff points are reset as MU and INTC attempt to break outside the 50+ year history of constraints in transistor-based memory.

Questions remain, he writes, such as “How scalable is the “bulk property state change” approach vs traditional transistor scaling, does Moore’s law still apply?” and “Can long-term scalability eventually surpass the limitations of tradtional electron-trapping storage?”

Ing also thinks a Micron buyout, a subject of much speculation in recent weeks, is now off the table: “A foreign deal to acquire Mircon appears even less likely given their highly strategic IP, potential for higher peak earnings, and CFIUS foreign investment hurdles.”

CLSA‘s Mark Heller, reiterating an Outperform rating on Micron, writes that being costlier than NAND and slower than DRAM, “applications are somewhere in between memory and storage,” and therefore limited initially, but that “longer term, cross point could be the successor technology to DRAM and NAND, and encroach on both opportunities.”

In the intermediate term, we think XPoint can find a niche in between DRAM and NAND applications. Estimating the market opportunity is difficult, but we think a good parallel for Micron’s XPoint TAM could be SanDisk’s ULLtraDIMM. According to SanDisk’s last analyst day (2014), ULLtraDIMM’s estimated 2017 TAM was expected to be about $0.5bn. We expect Micron to talk more about its new XPoint memory at its analyst day in August.

Deutsche Bank‘s Sidney Ho and Ross Sandler, reiterating a Buy rating on Micron, write that the companies have a years-long lead on the competition:

We believe Micron/Intel are the first companies to move into high volume production of this memory type, although others have also been working on similar memory technology. The secret sauce of XPoint appears to lie in the materials being used, as well as the architecture of the switch and memory cell structure that enables compatibility and integration in a product stack. As such, we believe it could take years for other suppliers to catch up.

There are immediate uses in replacing DRAM, write the authors, and also in solving processor “bottlenecks” for Intel:

While the companies do not expect XPoint to be a replacement technology for DRAM or NAND, but rather a product gap filler between the two, we believe initial applications will likely focus on replacing DRAM in enterprise applications such as in-memory database, where bringing massive amount of data closer to the processor could enable much faster analyses. We also think Intel is incentivized to enable the ecosystem for faster memory/storage to remove system bottlenecks and increase the appeal of high-end server processors. Over time, XPoint could also be used in PCs, although we think the cost could be a limiting factor.

Canaccord Genuity‘s Matthew Ramsey, who has a Buy raging on Intel, writes that the tech is “revolutionary, not evolutionary,” and could give both companies a big advantage:

While too early to predict the financial impact, we believe this technology has the potential to allow new and innovative computing architectures at both ends of the IoT – in data centers and at the edge. This technology could also provide differentiation for Intel/Micron in a brutally competitive memory industry.

This morning, price targets are being cut all around, even though estimates are going higher as many try to grapple with what Mark May of Citigroup summed up to Simon Hobbs on CNBC this morning: “There’s nowhere to hide anymore,” by which he meant, user growth has been essentially flat in the last four quarters in North America, something summed up by CFO Anthony Noto’s remark last night it will take quite a bit of time for user count to move dramatically higher given Twitter has yet to reach “mainstream” adoption.

Cantor Fitzgerald’s Youssef Squali reiterates a Buy rating this morning, and sticks to his $50 price target, writing “While uncertainty around user growth in 2H, an integrated marketing campaign this fall and new product launches/enhancements could keep the stock range-bound near-term, we believe that the long-term thesis around Twitter remains intact.”

His reasons:

1) its differentiated offering as the largest real-time broadcasting platform with over 300M MAUs, 2) growing level of monetization, and 3) material financial leverage over time. Twitter reported better-than-expected financial results and an incrementally better 2015 outlook, but disappointing underlying MAU growth and prospects for much of the same in 2H:15 caused the stock to sell off 10+% in after-hours trading.

Squalid raised his estimate for revenue and earnings this year to $2.24 billion and 23 cents from a prior $2.23 billion and 19 cents.

Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowack reiterates an Equal Weight rating, and cuts his price target to $36 from $39, writing that “commentary around the inability to break into ‘mass market’ bring into question the addressable market.”

“TWTR ultimately needs to drive ad load and pricing higher to work, and at current levels stock remains expensive in our view.”

SunTrust Robinson Humphrey’s Robert Peck, reiterating a Neutrla rating, cut his target to $38 from $40, writing that “the stock declined in the aftermarket for 4 main reasons:”

This is still a company that has to prove its business model, he writes:

We remain cautiously optimistic on TWTR in the long term due to: logged out user opportunity, new products, Google (GOOGL, $659.66, Buy) partnership, better targeting, and the potential to improve mass market penetration. However, in the short term given recent challenges, we think investors have labeled Twitter a “prove it” story. Execution on product rollouts and their ultimate effectiveness in growing MAUs/engagement will remain paramount.

Peck raised his revenue estimate for this year to $2.27 billion from $2.2 billion, but trimmed his EPS expectation to 39 cents from 44 cents.

Shares of data visualization software maker Tableau Software (DATA) are plunging, down $26.90, or 21%, at $100.17, despite reporting Q2 revenue and earnings that topped analysts’ expectations, and projecting this quarter’s revenue higher and even raising its year revenue outlook.

The stock already gapped down in pre-market action around 7:30, when the results were announced, but then it took another leg down with the disclosure by the company on the conference call following the release.

One of those bulls chimes in this morning, Brian White of Cantor Fitzgerald, with a note to clients titled “victim of high expectations,” who writes, “After multiple quarters of upside, we believe expectations were high going into the quarter.” However, “We reiterate our BUY rating. In our view, this represents another strong financial report by Tableau and highlights the company’s momentum in the world of Big Data.”

Revenue in the three months ended in June rose 65%, year over year, to $149.90, yielding EPS of 7 cents.

Analysts had been modeling $141 million and 5 cents a share.

License revenue rose 60% to $96.7 million.

CEO Christian Chabot called the results “another strong quarter,” citing the addition of “more than 3,000 new customer accounts,” for a total of “more than 32,000 worldwide.”

For the current quarter, the company sees revenue of $153 million to $157 million, which is ahead of consensus for $150.7 million.

For the full year, the company raised its outlook to a range of $617 million to $627 million, up from a prior range of $600 million to $610 million.

Shares of competitor Qlik Technologies (QLIK) are down 67 cents, or 1.7%, at $40.

Intel and Micron’s new memory-chip technology, “3D XPoint,” reads and writes data via a change in the chip’s material properties, rather than by an electron in a transistor.

Following the announcement earlier today by Intel (INTC) and Micron Technology (MU) of a new kind of memory chip, I spoke by phone with executives from both companies to get some further detail about the technology and where it fits in the marketplace.

The announcement was warmly received by the Street: Intel shares today ended the day up 61 cents, or 2%, at $28.96, while Micron stock was up $1.63, or 9%, at $19.75.

Micron stock got at least one upgrade today, from Drexel Hamilton‘s Rick Whittington, who raised his rating to Buy from Hold, with a $25 price target, up from $19, writing that the announcement “places a floor under the MU shares.”.

Brian Shirley, Micron’s head of memory technology and solutions, and Intel’s Robert Crooke, head of its non-volatile memory solutions group, were kind enough to take a few minutes to walk me through what they call ”3D XPoint,” pronounced “three-dee cross point.”

It is a chip technology they claim will be 1,000 times faster than traditional NAND flash memory chips.

A highlight of the device is that it doesn’t use transistors, the fundamental building block of most chips and the element most commonly used to hold an electron to represent a binary “1″ or a “0″ in most memory technologies.

As Crooke explained, “It uses a property change of the memory material itself; When we write to the cell, the material changes its properties.”

That allows for memory to be more densely stored and to bring down costs. Said Shirley, “moving away from charge-based storage gives either much larger capacity, or much faster operations.” There are, in fact, some transistors “in the decode and the metal lines that interconnect,” he adds.

The first thing to realize is that this device is not Intel and Micron’s “3-D” version of NAND; they are also working on that, as are Samsung Electronics (005930KS), and others. The new technology is entirely different, and it is seen as complementary, part of a “portfolio” of memory approaches the company sees co-existing.

“DRAM will still be a very fast scratch-pad storage, and NAND will be optimized for high density.”

“This new class of memory is right in between. It offers a whole new tool that wasn’t available for power or density or performance, or all three at the same time.”

As far as the economics, XPoint will be more expensive than traditional NAND, but cheaper than DRAM. “All three offer something that can be optimized,” says Shirley.

Shirley elaborated on aspects that separate XPoint from both NAND and DRAM:

Think of this really in terms of relative to NAND, having faster speeds but still relatively dense storage. Traditional NAND is optimized to get good high-end density and be faster than a hard drive. Well, with this, we are not talking about ten or twenty times faster than NAND, but several orders faster, and that gives us the ability to read handfuls of bits at a time rather than NAND, which functions on very large blocks of memory address at a time. This can read or write one bit at a time. And relative to DRAM, the easiest metric is that DRAM if DRAM can read in tens of nanoseconds, this can read and write on the order of hundreds of nanoseconds. So, it’s not nearly as fast as DRAM, but several time faster than NAND.

The device, which will initially come in a capacity of 128 gigabits, is built in the Lehi, Utah fab that Intel and Micron share for memory chip products (the two have had a joint venture on memory for years.)

I asked what semiconductor process technology this is, and Crooke said, “We would call it a 20-nano process, but it doesn’t really compare to something else in 20-nano.” Lithographic measures of “pitch” for a traditional semiconductor are based on the dimensions of the transistor; since this is a chip where most of the functioning parts are not transistors, the measurement is somewhat irrelevant.

However, the good thing about that, points out Crooke, is the technology is ready to go today with existing tools. 20-nano is not bleeding edge, with chips heading toward 10-nanometer production and, soon, 7 nano.

“The magic is in the memory cell, and in this cross-point array, which has taken years of development to make.”

“This is in a production fab today, and doesn’t require any new aspects of manufacturing.”

The chip uses conventional silicon wafer approaches to manufacturing. Added Shirley, “There’s nothing exotic required here, so as demand increases, this is something that can be part of further manufacturing plants.”

“The cost point is that it’s a simpler structure, and so the interesting thing is it is more manufacturable at a finer line width over time” than are most traditional logic or memory structures.

The “cross point” that connects cells is “an innovative stack of materials,” he notes.

The new technology will show in products “in 2016,” said Shirley, declining to elaborate further.

Applications of the technology might include both PC uses, such as fast gaming, and high-performance data center and cloud and scientific computing, the two men noted.

“There’s a whole new world of possibilities for things that need much bigger memory or really fast storage,” including “in-memory” databases such as SAP (SAP) “Hana.”

I asked if this could also serve the server plug-in memory needs that Fusion-io made into a big market, before it was acquired by SanDisk (SNDK). Both indivuals concurred that was a good example of a potential initial market for the technology.

About Tech Trader Daily

Tech Trader Daily is a blog on technology investing written by Barron’s veteran Tiernan Ray. The blog provides news, analysis and original reporting on events important to investors in software, hardware, the Internet, telecommunications and related fields. Comments and tips can be sent to: techtraderdaily@barrons.com.